Contemporary Literary Theory

This essay was published in the Brock Review
Volume 2 Number 1, 1993 pp. 90-106, which publication holds the
copyright. The article addresses contemporary theory in its more
post-structural mode, and were I to rewrite it today I would put
more emphasis on the cultural studies model, on the growth of gender studies,
and on New Historicism, than I do here. I believe however that what I have to say here is still relevant and describes the fundamental paradigm
shift which has altered the direction and mandate of literary study.

Studies in literature in universities in the
last two decades have been marked by the growing interest in and bitter division
over a set of related theoretical approaches known collectively as Literary
Theory. Many Departments have become divided between "theory people" and
opponents who see themselves as defending the traditional values central to the
culture against Theorys perceived anti-humanism. Literary Theory is part of a
wide-spread movement in the culture which has affected a number of disciplines,
occasioning similar disputes in some, a movement which has explored and
elucidated the complexities of meaning, textuality and interpretation. Literary
Theory is not a single enterprise but a set of related concepts and practices 
most importantly deconstruction, post-Althusserian ideological or 'political'
criticism, post-Lacanian psychoanalytic criticism, New Historicist or 'cultural'
criticism, some reader-response criticism and much feminist criticism. The aim
of this essay is to define the issues that ground these contemporary literary
theories.

There have always been literary theories 
about how literature works, what meaning is, what it is to be an author and so
forth. The central interpretive practices in force and in power in the academy
which are being challenged by Theory were themselves revolutionary, theory-based
practices which became the norm. The two main critical practices in the mid
portion of the century have been the formalist tradition, or 'New Criticism',
which sees a text as a relatively self-enclosed meaning-production system which
develops enormous signifying power through its formal properties and through its
conflicts, ambiguities and complexities, and the Arnoldian humanist tradition
exemplified most clearly in the work of F. R. Leavis and his followers, which
concentrates evaluatively on the capacity of the author to represent moral
experience concretely and compellingly. Many readers have in practice combined
the values and methodologies of these traditions, different as their theoretical
bases are.

Contemporary theory: the issues at stake

Theories and interpretive practices change with
time, reflecting changing world-views and uses of literature, and each
theoretical perspective tends to find fault with the one before  apparently a
normal evolutionary pattern, an orderly changing of the paradigm guard, the
child rebelling against the parent as a way [end page 90] of
proclaiming its identity. Literary Theory challenges this orderly developmental
premise, suggesting that this continual cultural change reflects an inherent
instability, fault lines in cultural imagination which demonstrate the
impossibility of any certain meaning which could have any ultimate claim on us.

Contemporary Literary Theory is marked by
a number of
premises, of which I will present nine, although not all of the theoretical
approaches share or agree on all of them.

Meaning is assumed, in Saussure's seminal
contribution, to be created by difference, not by "presence" (the
identification of the sign with the object of meaning). A word means in that
it differs from other words in the same meaning-area, just as a phoneme is
registered not by its sound but by its difference from other sound segments.
There is no meaning in any stable or absolute sense, only chains of
differences from other meanings.

Words themselves are polysemic (they have multiple
meanings) and their meaning is over-determined (they have more meaning
potential than is exercised in any usage instance). They thus possess
potential excess meanings. As well, rhetorical constructions enable
sentences to mean more than their grammar would allow  irony is an example.
Language always means more than it may be taken to mean in any one context.
It must have this capacity of excess meaning in order for it to be
articulate, that is, jointed, capable of movement, hence of relationship and
development.

Language use is a much more complex, elusive
phenomenon than we ordinarily suspect, and what we take normally to be our
meanings are only the surface of a much more substantial theatre of
linguistic, psychic and cultural operations, of which operations we are not
fully aware.

It is language itself, not some essential humanness
or timeless truth, that is central to culture, meaning and identity. As
Heidegger remarked, man does not speak language, language speaks man. Humans
'are' their sign systems, they are constituted through them, and those
systems and their meanings are contingent, patch-work, relational.

Consequently there is no foundational 'truth' or
reality  no absolute, no eternals, no solid ground of truth beneath the
shifting sands of history. There are only local and contingent 'truths'
generated by human groups through their cultural systems in response to
their needs for power, survival and esteem. Consequently, both values and
personal identity are cultural constructs, not stable entitles. As Kaja
Silverman points out even the unconscious is a cultural construct, as the
unconscious is constructed through repression, the forces of repression are
cultural, and what is taboo is culturally formulated.

It follows that there is no stable central
identity or essence to individuals: an individual exists as a nexus of
social meanings and practices, psychic and ideological forces, and uses of
language and other signs and symbols. The [end page 91] individual is thus a
'de-centered' phenomenon, there is no stable self, only subject-positions
within a shifting cultural, ideological, signifying field.

The meaning that appears as normal in our social life
masks, through
various means such as omission, displacement, difference, misspeaking and
bad faith, the meaning that is: the world of meaning we think we occupy is
not the world we do in fact occupy. The world we do occupy is a construction
of ideology, an imagination of the way the world is that shapes our world,
including our 'selves', for our use.

A text is, as Roland Barthes points out,
etymologically a tissue, a
woven thing (from the Latin texere, to weave); it is a tissue woven
of former texts and language uses, echoes of which it inherently retains
(filiations or traces, these are sometimes called), woven of historical
references and practices, and woven of the play ('play' as meaning-abundance
and as articulability) of language. A text is not, and cannot be, 'only
itself', nor can it be reified, said to be 'a thing'; a text is a process.
Literary Theory advocates pushing against the depth, complexity and
indeterminacy of this tissue until not only the full implications of the
multiplicities, but the contradictions inevitably inherent in them, become
apparent.

There is no "outside-of-the-text," in
Derrida's phrase. Culture
and individuals are constructed through networks of affiliated language,
symbol and discourse usages; all of life is textual, a tissue of signifying
relationships. No text can be isolated from the constant circulation of
meaning in the economy of the culture; every text connects to, and is
constituted through and of, other texts.

Contemporary Theory as part of the 'Interpretive Turn'

Contemporary literary theory does not stand on its own; it is part of a
larger cultural movement which has revolutionized many fields of
study, which movement is often known as the 'interpretive turn'. The
'interpretive turn' was essentially introduced by Immanuel Kant two
centuries ago through the idea that what we experience as reality is shaped
by our mental categories, although Kant thought of these categories as
stable and transcendent. Nietzsche proposed that there are no grounding
truths, that history and experience are fragmented and happenstance, driven
by the will to power. Marx and Freud theorized that what passes for reality
is in fact shaped and driven by forces of which we are aware only
indirectly, if at all, but which we can recover if we understand the
processes of transformation through which our experience passes. What is new
in the interpretive turn is that the insights of these and other seminal
thinkers have coalesced into a particular sociological phenomenon, a
cultural
force, a genuine moment in history, and that they have resulted in
methodological disputes and in alterations of practice in the social
sciences and the humanities. [end page 92]

There are a number of ideas central to the
interpretive turn: the idea that an observer is inevitably a participant in
what is observed, and that the receiver of a message is a component of the
message; the idea that information is only information insofar as it is
contextualized; the idea that individuals are cultural constructs whose
conceptual worlds are composed of a variety of discursive structures, or
ways of talking about and imagining the world; the idea that the world of
individuals is not only multiple and diverse but is constructed by and
through interacting fields of culturally lived symbols, through language in
particular; the related idea that all cultures are networks of signifying
practices; the idea that therefore all interpretation is conditioned by
cultural perspective and is mediated by symbols and practice; and the idea
that texts entail sub-texts, or the often disguised or submerged origins and
structuring forces of the messages.

Interpretation is seen not as the elucidation of a preexisting truth or
meaning that is objectively 'there' but as the positing of meaning by
interpreters in the context of their conceptual world. Neither the
'message' nor the interpretation can be transparent or innocent as
each is structured by constitutive and often submerged cultural and personal
forces. In the interpretation of culture, culture is seen as a text, a set
of discourses which structure the world of the culture and control the
culture's practices and meanings. Because of the way discourses are
constituted and interrelated, one must read through, among and under them,
at the same time reading oneself reading.

The 'dangers' of Literary Theory

It appears to many that Literary Theory attacks the fundamental value of
literature and of literary study. If everything is a text, literature is just
another text, with no particular privilege aside from its persuasive power. If
there are no certain meanings or truths, and if human beings are cultural
constructs not grounded in any universal 'humanness' and not sustained by any
transhistorical truths, not only the role of literature as the privileged
articulator of universal value but the existence of value itself is
threatened. If interpretation is local and contingent, then the stability and
surety of meaning is threatened and the role of literature as a communication
of wisdom and as a cultural force is diminished. If interpretation is
dependent upon the interpreter, then one must discount the intention of the
author. The stability of meaning becomes problematic when one suspects the
nature of the forces driving it or the goals it may attempt to attain.
Imaginative constructs such as literature may in fact be merely culturally
effective ways of masking the exercise of power, the bad faith, the flaws and
inequities which culture works so hard to obscure. Ultimately Theory can be
seen to attack the very ground of value and meaning itself, to attack those
transcendent human values on which humane learning is based, and to attack the [end page 93]
centre of humanism, the existence of the independent, moral, integrated
individual who is capable of control over her meanings, intentions and acts.

As theory has become more central in English departments, literary studies
have in the view of many turned away from the study of literature itself to
the study of theory. And as attention moves to literature as the cultural
expression of lived life, and to the textuality of all experience, the
dividing line between 'literature' and more popular entertainment is being
challenged; such things as detective fiction and romances are being treated to
as serious and detailed a study as are canonical works. The Canon itself, that
collection of texts considered worthy of study by those in control of the
curriculum, is under attack as ethnocentric, patriarchal and elitist, and as
essentializing in that it tends to create the idea that canonical works are
independent entities standing on their own intrinsic and transcendent
authority and not rooted in the agencies and contingencies of history.

It is the case that Literary Theory challenges many fundamental
assumptions, that it is often sceptical in its disposition, and that it can
look in practice either destructive of any value or merely cleverly playful.
The issues however must be whether Theory has good reasons for its questioning
of traditional assumptions, and whether it can lead to interpretive practices
that are ultimately productive of understandings and values which can support
a meaningful and just life. In order to further elucidate Literary
Theory's reasons for its stands, it would be useful to examine and illustrate
three main areas of meaning in literature: context, ideology and discourse,
and language itself.

The issue of meaning: context and inter-text

The process of meaning in literature should, one thinks, be clear: authors
write books, with ideas about what they want to say; they say it in ways that
are powerful, moving, convincing; readers read the books and, depending on
their training and capacities and the author's success, they get the message.
And the message is, surely, the point. It is at this juncture however that
this simple communication model runs into trouble. An author writes a text.
But the author wrote the text in at least four kinds of context (note
the presence of the text), not all of which contexts the author is or
can be fully aware of. There are, first, aesthetic contexts  the contexts of
art generally, of its perceived role in culture, of the medium of the text, of
the genre of the text, of the particular aesthetic traditions the artist
chooses and inherits, of the period-style in which she writes. Second, there
are the cultural and economic conditions of the production and the reception
of texts  how the 'world of art' articulates to the rest of the social world,
how the work is produced, how it is defined, how it is distributed, who the
audience is, how they pay, what it means to consume art, how art is socially
categorized. Third, there is the artist's own personal [end page 94] history and the cultural interpretation
of that personal history and meaning for her as an individual and an artist.
Lastly and most essentially, there are the larger meanings and methods of the
culture and of various sub-cultural, class, ethnic, regional and gender groups
 all of them culturally formed, and marked (or created) by various
expressions and distinctions of attitude, thought, perception, and symbols.
These include how the world is viewed and talked about, the conception and
distribution of power, what is seen as essential and as valuable, what the
grounds and warrants of value are, how the relations among individuals and
groups are conceptualized.

These are the most basic considerations of the context of the production of
a literary work. Some of them are known to the author explicitly, some are
sensed implicitly, some are unrecognized and virtually unknowable. Every
context will alter, emend, deflect, restructure the 'meaning'. This would be
easier to handle interpretively if the same constraints of context did not
apply also to the reader. Both author and reader are 'situated' aesthetically,
culturally, personally, economically, but usually differently situated. The
reader has the further context of the history and traditions of the
interpretation of texts. When we read Hamlet, we read it as a text that
has been interpreted before us and for us in certain ways, not simply as the
text that Shakespeare wrote or that his repertory company performed, whatever
that was experienced to be.

An essential, central and inevitable context of any text is the existence
of other texts. Any literary work, even the most meager, will necessarily
refer to and draw on works in its genre before it, on other writing in the
culture and its traditions, and on the discourse-structures of the culture.
This creation of meaning from previous and cognate expressions of meaning is
known in Literary Theory as "intertextuality." Anything that is a
text is inevitably part of the circulation of discourse in the culture, what
one might call the inter-text: it can only mean because there are other texts
to which it refers and on which it then depends for its meaning. It follows
that 'meaning' is in fact dispersed throughout the inter-text, is not simply
'in' the text itself. The field of the inter-text extends not just to the
traditions and usages of the genre, and to literature generally, but to
intellectual traditions, language and argument, to emotional experiences, to
cultural interpretations of experience, to central symbols, to all expressions
of meaning in the culture: it is a network of allusion and reference. This is
the ground of the question of the extent to which an individual can
author a text. Many of these intertextual meanings may not be apparent to
readers, who must be situated themselves in the inter-text in order to
participate in the meaning. All meanings of a text depend on the meanings of
the inter-text, and our interpretations of texts depend on our contextualized
perspective and the norms of what Stanley Fish refers to as our
"interpretive community," our socially-determined interpretive
understandings and methods. [end page 95]

The issue of meaning: discourse and ideology

The second general area of meaning is that of discourse and ideology.
'Discourse' is a term associated most closely with Michel Foucault; it refers
to the way in which meaning is formed, expressed and controlled in a culture
through its language use. Every culture has particular ways of speaking about
and hence conceptualizing experience, and rules for what can and what can not
be said and for how talk is controlled and organized. It is through discourse
that we constitute our experience, and an analysis of discourse can reveal how
we see the world  in the case of Foucault, particularly the changing and
multiple ways in which power is distributed and exercised. As language is the
base symbol system through which culture is created and maintained, it can be
said that everything is discourse, that is, that we only register as being
what we attach meaning to, we attach meaning through language, and meaning
through language is controlled by the discursive structures of a culture.
There is no outside-of-the-text; our experience is constructed by our way of
talking about experience, and thus is itself a cultural, linguistic construct.

Discourse is not, however, a unitary phenomenon. One of the great
contributions of the Russian theorist of language and literature, Mikhail
Bakhtin, is the concept of multivocality. The concept of multivocality might
be likened to meteorology: the sky looks like a unitary entity, but if one
attempts to measure it or traverse it, it turns out to be full of cross-winds,
whirls, temperature variations, updrafts, downdrafts, and so forth. Similarly
the language of a culture is full of intersecting language uses  those of
class, profession, activity, generation, gender, region and so forth, a rich
profusion of interacting significances and inter-texts.

As discourse constructs a world-view and as it inscribes power relations,
it is inevitably connected to ideology. As used by Marx, the term referred to
the idea that our concepts about the structure of society and of reality,
which appear to be matters of fact, are the product of economic relations.
More recent thinkers, following Gramsci and Althusser, tend to see ideology
more broadly as those social practices and conceptualizations which lead us to
experience reality in a certain way. Ideology, writes Althusser, is our
imagined relation to the real conditions of existence; our subjectivity is
formed by it we are 'hailed' by it, oriented to the world in a certain way.
Ideology is an implicit, necessary part of meaning, in how we configure the
world. But ideology is always masking, or 'naturalizing', the injustices and
omissions it inevitably creates, as power will be wielded by some person or
class, and will pressure the understanding of the culture so that the exercise
of power looks normal and right and violations appear as inevitabilities. It
was clear in time past, for instance, why women were inferior. Women were
physically weaker, more emotional, not as rational. The Bible said they were
inferior and Nature said so too. Men did not think that [end page 96] they were oppressing women; women's
inferiority was simply an obvious matter of fact, as was the inferiority of
blacks, of children, the handicapped, the mad, the illiterate, the working
classes. The theorist Pierre Macherey showed that it is possible by examining
any structure of communication to see its ideological perspective through the
breaks, the silences, the contradictions hidden in the text, as well as
through all its implicit assumptions about the nature of the world.

Structuralism/Poststructuralism

The concept of ideology is part of structuralist and, consequent to that,
poststructuralist thought. Structuralism was a broad movement which attempted
to locate the operative principles which ground activities and behaviours; its
importance to Literary Theory is substantial, although Literary Theory has
rejected a number of its premises. Two central structural theories were
Freud's psychoanalytic theory and Marx's economic/political theories. What
marks these theories as structuralist is their locating of generative forces
below or behind phenomenal reality, forces which act according to general laws
through transformative processes. In structural theories, motive, or
generative force, is found not in a pre-text but in a sub-text; the surface is
a transformation, a re-coded articulation of motive forces and conditions, and
so the surface must be translated rather then simply read. From the rise of
the whole rich field of semiotics to the theorizing of the history of science
to the revolutionizing of anthropology to the creation of family therapy,
structuralism has been a central, pervasive force in the century. The idea of
decoding the depth from the manifestations of the surface, that what appears
is often masking or is a transformation of what is, is a key tenant of
Literary Theory.

Poststructuralism carries on with the idea of the surface as a
transformation of hidden forces, but rejects structuralism's sense that there
are timeless rules which govern transformations and which point to some stable
reality below and governing the flux  what poststructuralism refers to as an
essentialist or totalizing view. Poststructuralism sees 'reality' as being
much more fragmented, diverse, tenuous and culture-specific than does
structuralism. Some consequences have been, first, poststructuralism's greater
attention to specific histories, to the details and local contextualizations
of concrete instances; second, a greater emphasis on the body, the actual
insertion of the human into the texture of time and history; third, a greater
attention to the specifies of cultural working, to the arenas of discourse and
cultural practice; lastly, a greater attention to the role of language and
textuality in our construction of reality and identity. Literary Theory is a poststructural
practice. [end page 97]

A demonstration reading: ideology

Perhaps we should take a moment to examine
some of these concepts in art at work, with the warning that Literary Theory
represents a broad range of practices and emphases, and no one kind of reading
can be fully exemplary. Take, however, just the first lines of Shakespeare's
Sonnet 129:

Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of
blame.

This looks like a clear moral point: lust is
bad stuff. There is, however, more to 'read' in these lines. As there was no
standardized spelling in Shakespeare's time, the spelling of "waste" is
an editorial decision. It could have been spelled "waist;" the force of the
pun is inevitably present. A "waist of shame" is a female waist,
particularly when "spirit" is expended there, as "spirit" was a
euphemism both for semen and for (as "sprit") the penis. So we have
here lust in action indeed, genital intercourse. But notice the valuation of
the sexes. The male is associated with the spirit  with the 'good', with non-material
value; the woman is associated with the lowest of material being, waste. He is
'above' her in every sense. As in modern advertising, the male is coded for
action, the woman is coded as body parts. It is to the woman, not to the man,
that shame is attached; woman is the waist/waste of shame. There is in the line
as well a metaphysical discrimination, as the world of 'spirit' is valued over
the world of the body; it is not to the spirit but to the body that waste and
shame are attached. There is an economic ideology here, as the sexual act is
an economic transaction  "expense" and "waste"  with the
male having the power of the purse, economic, moral, sexual power tied
together. This economic language not only again privileges men, but places the
imagination of the poem within the bourgeois mercantile culture. Shakespeare's
lines can be analyzed to reveal not, or not only, a lucid and moving moral
perspective, but an ideological construction which privileges male over female
and spirit over matter, which uses moral terms in an oppressive manner, and
which in the end shares and shows bad faith in many ways. The very language of
the line undermines the certainty and centrality of the moral perspective the
poem is claiming.

This undermining is continued in the bland
assumption of the second line that action is naturally consequent upon lust,
an assumption which has been used against women for centuries, and in the
third line's linking sex and violence together as if that were natural. It is,
shockingly enough, to the devilment of the gap between lust and release,
"till action," that the word "blame" refers; while shame
is attached to the woman, blame is attached to the bad things men do in the
heat of needing to get it off. Further, the moral perspective within the poem
is placed in a neutral, remote way as if it were inevitable, unassailable:
while "blame" requires an agent, a blamer, it is spoken of as if it
were inherent ("full [end page 98] of blame"), and the tone
is authoritative. Finally, the poem uses language from various realms of
discourse  moral, physical, social, economic  and seams them together in a
seemingly benign and normal, but damaging way.

The issue of meaning: language

The third large general area to be addressed is that of language.
Contemporary theory rejects the commonplace belief that language functions by
establishing a one-on-one relationship between a word and an object or state
which exists independent of language. Among the assumptions behind this
rejected belief are that reality is objective and is directly and
unequivocally knowable; that words have a transparent relation to that reality
 one can 'see through' the word to the reality itself; and that that meaning
is consequently fixed and stable. Contemporary theory accepts none of this.
'Reality' is too simple a formulation for the collection of acknowledgments of
physical entities and conditions, of concepts of all kinds, and of all the
feelings, attitudes, perceptions, rituals, routines and practices that compose
our habited world. Medieval medicine was based in large part on astrology, and
astrology was based on the known fact that the (not too distant) planets each
had a signature vibration which impressed the aether between the planets and
the earth, which in turn impressed the malleable fabric of the mind of the
newborn, and which thus created the person's disposition through the
combination of and the relation between the characteristics of the dominant
planets at the time of birth. To what reality, do we think now, did the
language of medieval medicine refer? We could say that the medievals were
'wrong', but the conceptions involved so structured their imagination of human
nature and motivation, so suffused their attitudes, were so integrated with
values which we still hold, that such a statement would be meaningless.
Language exists in the domain of human conception, and is dependent not on
'reality' but on how we see relations, connections, and behaviours. In turn
how we see these things are, of course, dependent on our language.

Since the work of Ferdinand de Saussure at the beginning of the century,
language has been seen by many to signify through difference: words mean in
that, and as, they differ from other words, which words in turn mean in that they
differ from yet other words. 'Meaning' becomes a chain of differentiations
which are necessarily at the same time linkages, and so any meaning involves
as a part of itself a number of other meanings  through opposition, through
association, through discrimination. As a word defines itself through
difference from words which define themselves through difference from words,
language becomes a kind of rich, multiplex sonar that carries the cognitive,
affective and allusive freight of meanings shaped by and reflected off other
meanings, full of dimensionally. Derrida's famous coinage différence,
which includes both [end page 99] differing and deferring, catches something
of the operation, although Derrida's concept penetrates to the very structure
of being, to the differing and deferring without which space and time are
impossible and which are thus fundamental to 'being' itself.

Language has many 'levels' or currents of meaning, shifting, interrelating,
playing off one another, implicated (from L. plicare, to fold) and
pliant (from F. plier, to bend, ultimately from plicare). Some
currents carry us back as in cultural memory to the etymological roots of the
words, as just illustrated. Some currents carry us back to the time and the
way in which, as infants, we entered the symbolic order, the world of signs
and thus of authority, power and socially (Lacan), and even before that to
evocations of our infantile immediate, inchoate experiences (Kristeva). Some
currents tie us in to experiences and symbols that involve and evoke our
repressions, our fears, and our narcissistic needs. Some currents tie us in to
the various worlds of "discourse," socially constituted ways of
conceptualizing and talking and feeling  judicial, economic, domestic,
theological, academic and so forth (Foucault). Some currents tie us into key
cultural symbols, to ways we see and feel the world as constructed, to our
imaginary world of hope, trust, identity, to our projection of ourselves into
the future and into our environment. Many currents carry affective weight, as
words are learned in social contexts from people who are usually close to us,
and there is thus an intrinsic sociality in the very acquisition of the
meanings and hence to the meanings themselves (Volosinov). Meaning in language
is highly context-sensitive. Words are not little referential packages, they
are shapes of potential meaning which alter in different meaning environments,
which implicate many areas of experience, which contain traces of those
differences which define them, and which are highly dependent on context, on
tone, on placement.

A further demonstration reading: language and meaning

In order to look at how language might be approached in contemporary theory
 again with the caveat that there are many approaches and understandings within the domain of theory  let us take the first sentence from this first
quatrain of Shakespeare's Sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not
love
Which alters where it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.

One might ask, does the word "admit" mean "confess" or
"allow to enter?" Is "impediment" a legal or a conceptual
term here, or a term from the world of physical manipulation, a stumbling
block? An impediment is something that gets in the way of pedes, the
foot, and while the word "impediment" as a moral or social hindrance
is taken from the marriage ceremony, that explanation does not [end page 100] consum
exhaust the meaning potential  "impediment" also meant a
physical defect or impairment, a speech defect, and baggage. Its use must
include these possibilities through the operations of difference. Why, one
might go on to wonder, are the worlds of morality ("admit") and of
fault ("impediment") immediately entered into the world of
"true minds"? And is it chance that, on the levels of both
conceptualization and enunciation, the smooth rhythmic flow of the first line
is suddenly interrupted by two tough Latinate words? These words not only need
to be stumbled over and figured out but introduce worlds of opposition on
several levels: criminality vs. innocence, fault vs. wholeness, social/legal vs.
moral/philosophical. Hasn't the poem just admitted a number of impediments
while saying it wasn't going to admit impediments?

The phrase itself "the marriage of true minds" implicitly admits
an impediment. This impediment is the body. The body is admitted but denied by
the word "impediment" with its root reference to stumbling feet but
its abstract usage, and the body is implied by "marriage". The
phrase "marriage of true minds" raises the whole question of the
body by being explicitly about minds, whereas marriage itself as an
institution is a union of bodies and property. The body is admitted by
"marriage" most strongly through the fact that marriage is a social
act (sanctified by the Church, the Body of Christ, and only legal when
witnessed by others, bodily presences), through the realm of the legal, the
control of bodies, and through the legitimation of marriage, as a marriage
which was not "consummated," an interesting concept in itself, was considered not to be a
marriage.

There is yet another impediment in the sentence. The word "true" in
reference to "minds" suggests of course straightness or levelness,
body values, but it suggests by exclusion the unstraightness of mind that the
"true" is structured against and includes by difference. If the
speaker has to say "true minds" then there are untrue minds, so we
have to ask what the 'mind' is here that is being married, what the nature of
'mind' is. The word cannot refer to some abstract, non-physical value or being
if 'mind' can be unstraight, morally unsound, not on the level, therefore
fallen, therefore (as fallen) in the world of action and conflict and thus of
the body. But 'mind' is obviously explicitly opposed to the body, and the body
is an impediment. The sentence's play of meaning forces us inexorably back to
the centrality of the body, and questions the status of 'mind'.

There is another impediment that the poem admits from the very beginning:
"Let me not ....." Who is to let or not let the speaker admit
impediments? (A "let" was, incidentally, a hindrance, an
impediment). There is someone who can stop him from not admitting impediments,
otherwise he would not have said "Let me not:" a world of power and
restriction peeks forth, qualifying the apparent freedom the line claims. As
well, "Let me not," with its implicit emotional appeal, takes us
back psychically to the world of restriction, prohibition, [end page 101] forbidding, and in its colloquial force and its
imperative, demanding tone to the two-year-old's universe, its evocation
therefore of narcissism, of the taboo, of the root conflict of social life and
personal identity; it thus enters us into a world of meaning which on the
surface sorts oddly with the social/legal language that follows.

There is in the sentence as a counter-current a narcissism, the juvenile
self-aggrandizement of a speaker who thinks he could in fact stop the marriage
of true minds. But if anyone can stop the marriage of true minds, as obviously
he believes that they can (or he can), then it is probably because the
marriage of true minds does depend on the powers of property, the body,
physical and social force, and so the line really does not in fact claim the
power or liberty of the spiritual nature of humans, as an unsuspecting reading
might assume, but claims instead the power of the physical and judicial. This
may well be what the line really confesses or, to put it another way, the
reality that the ideological structure masks: that the social, judicial,
physical elements of our world do in fact have the force over a union of
persons that the line denies that they do, and perhaps that in point of fact a
'person' is comprised of these physical, social, legislative elements, these
worlds of discourse, of the constitutive imaginary. The case could be made
that the idealism of the apparent meaning of the line, which idealism depends
on there being real, isolable, inviolate "minds," is what is
ultimately put in question; on the other hand, the 'obvious' meaning of the
line remains in force, creating a challenge, a contest of meaning, an undecidablility.

Not only does this short sentence launch us on a strange journey of
oppositions and contradictions, but it enters us into whole arenas of cultural
discourse and concern, the long-standing philosophical debates about the
relation of and values of mind and body, the place of the power of the
judicial in the world of body and mind, the sociality of the individual, the
nature of marriage and what it entails, the physically of marriage both
sexually and legally and the relation of that physicality to the moral world,
issues of moral freedom, issues of what constitutes the good. These differing
but implicated worlds, with their differing assumptions, language uses and
emotional resonances  importantly including the poetic expressions of these
debates  become part of the meaning of the line.

Different Literary Theory approaches would concentrate on different aspects
of these considerations, give them different weight. A deconstructive approach
would concentrate on the way that the sentence works against itself, proving
for instance the dominance of law and the body while apparently proclaiming
the freedom of the mind  it might be claimed that what I have done is to
"deconstruct" the sentence. Typically too deconstruction would begin
with something that seemed extra, or marginal, or unchallenged, the presence
of the lowly foot in "impediment', or the absent presence of the body,
and might show how the meaning ultimately depends on that exclusion or
marginalized element. [end page 102]
An ideological approach might concentrate on the complex
of linguistic and social meanings which attempt to but ultimately fail to
support the ideological construction of an independent autonomous immaterial
self, and might tie that in with, say, the development of the (false) identity
of the inviolate 'self' in the western capitalist regime. It might also want
to look at the conditions of production and consumption of the line  who
wrote it for whom, under what conditions, with what social implications and
class exclusions, for what kind of payment and reward, and how those things
shape and are subtly present in the line itself. This form of poetry was
written for the leisure class, the world which had power over the bodies and
discourses of others, by the leisure class or those who wished to profit by
them, and was circulated to privileged individuals in manuscript form, not
(basely, popularly) published. A psychoanalytic approach might well head
straight for the narcissistic demand and assumptions of the first words, on
the currents of projection, denial and pre-symbolic conflicts that swirl
through the line, and on the issues of subjectivity, identity (or loss of
identity) and displacement that the line suggests. A reader-response reading
would concentrate on how the line structures our responses, and on the larger
issues of how our horizons of meaning can coincide with those of the author,
writing in a different time with different preconceptions. A cultural
criticism or new historicist reading might want to work hard to see how the
linguistic, ideological, cultural constructs present in the line tied in with
those of other texts and with the cultural practices of the time, and to thus
articulate the sentence in its culturally embedded implications, meanings and
conflicts. It would be most interested in the lines of power that the
sentence
suggests and how they reflect the social structures of the time, and in the
power of the discourses themselves (the areas of for instance personal demand,
philosophy of love, judicial and confessional legislation and experience,
social institutions) and how they work with and against each other.

What these approaches would not do is merely affirm that the lines
support the ideals of the freedom and independence of love and the wonder of
the human spirit, although most would grant the presence and power of these
meanings in the line. These approaches would not seek closure, trying to
resolve into a neat package the various conflicts and centrifugal tendencies
of the line (a "reader response" reading would include the natural
human demand for closure as part of its reading and therefore as part of the
way the line 'makes' its meaning). Most of these readings would focus in some
way on the disparities in our imaginations and our practices that the line
reveals, the contingency of our lives, the hidden exercises of social power
that the line finally confesses. They might well think that the line means
more, humanly speaking, than the humanistic reading would suggest. [end page
103]

Is Literary Theory bad for us, and will it go away?

There is a certain self-satisfied celebration among people opposed to
Literary Theory who see that the practice of deconstruction, the most
metaphysically-based and in some ways the most oppositional and intricate of
the contemporary critical theories, is apparently on the decline. It is
unlikely, however, that its methodology and its insights will be wholly left
behind, or that the issues it raised or faced will disappear. Deconstruction
de-limited linguistic performance and critical thought and has afforded the
most astute critique of our failure to question the assumptions and the
complexities of our uses of language and discourses. Deconstruction has
furthered the work of existential and hermeneutic thought in attempting to
locate meaning in a world which has no permanent or ultimate metaphysical
realities to underwrite its meaningfulness, and it has most refreshingly
challenged both the pieties of humanism and the rigidities of structuralism.
The other kinds of Literary Theory, enriched by poststructural theory and
deconstructive practice, are still in force, coalescing most effectively at
the moment in the cultural analyses of New Historicism and in the work of
ideological criticism with both 'high' and popular culture in penetrating to
the motives and mystifications of cultural meanings. Contemporary critical
theories may or may not be 'right,' given that there is a 'right,' but the
issues that they address are genuine and considerable, as is their
contribution to and place in contemporary thought, and the practice gives rise
to serious and at times telling interpretations and revaluations.

Brock University St. Catharines, ON

A Guide to Further Reading

There are hundreds of books on Contemporary
Theory. This guide gives texts one might begin with of theorists mentioned in
the essay, introductions to contemporary theory , and major movements.

I Theorists mentioned

Althusser, Louis. 1971. "Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses" in Lenin and Philosophy. London:
New Left Books.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. "Discourse in
the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of
Texas Press. See Volosinov

de Saussure, Ferdinand. 1959. Course in
General Linguistics. New York: The Philosophical Library.

Derrida, Jaques. 1967. Of Grammatology.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, and 1992. Acts of Literature,
ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge. Derrida is very difficult; see
"Deconstruction" for some introductions to his work.

Fish, Stanley. 1980. Is There a Text in
This Class?. Boston: Harvard University Press.

Silverman, Kaja. 1983. The Subject of Semiotics,
Oxford: Oxford University Press. Silverman gives a good introduction to
psychoanalysis and semiotics.

Volosinov, V.N. 1973. Marxism and the Philosophy of
Language. New York: Academic Press. Originally published in 1929 and said
to have been written in whole or part by Bakhtin, it contains one of the
finest and earliest critiques of de Saussure.

II Introductions to
Contemporary Theory

The best remains Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory:
An Introduction, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983; very
good and more difficult is Frank Lentricchia's After the New Criticism,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. A good brief introduction with
applications is Catherine Belsey's Critical Practice, London: Methuen,
1980.

Psychoanalytic Criticism. Elizabeth Wright's Psychoanalytic
Criticism: Theory in Practice, London: Routledge, 1984, is a good
introduction; see also Silvemm.

Reader Response. Susan R. Suleinian and Inge Crossman
have edited a very good selection of writings in The Reader in the Text.
Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1980. The most read book is
Wolfgang Iser's The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. See Fish for a more
post-structural approach.